September 2010 News

Ted Rall shares his experience in Afghanistan and discusses the purpose of his book in this brief interview with Mike Rhode from WashingtonCityPaper.com. He talks politics, targets the most severe problems for the American worker and the average citizen, and blames backwards American Capitalism for deliberately making America poorer. What can and should Americans do, according to Rall? Overthrow the government and start anew. As he says in the article, “We can overthrow the system that is abusing us and replace it with something better.”

It's a brave new world of media consumption, but Project Censored's mission hasn't really changed. More than ever, people need help sifting through this cacophony to figure out what they truly need to know. — San Francisco Bay Guardian

You left to go get religious training?
I started going to church then. And that’s where I realized people weren’t prejudiced. That people really loved people and [I saw] a whole different realm of things … treating you like you was a human being. That’s why whenever I seen this going on at that detention facility, all these flashbacks kept coming back.
Like what?
These poor, immigrant people are just trying to make a living, trying to please people, and still try to take care of their families. A lot of them are just migrant workers. I talked to a lot of them in the detention facility who knew English real well, because my Spanish was terrible. They’re just hard-working people who … for hundreds of years they’ve been crossing the border. And they come over here and they work in our fields and they pick our fruits. … I mean, those are jobs that most Americans don’t want. Oh yeah, they want the supervisor job where they can boss the people around, where they don’t have to get out there and pick the fruit and work in some of these different places.
—from Tony Hefner's interview aboutBetween the Fences

From "Life and Productivity," Dahr Jamail's long, excellent article about Derrick Jensen and resistance at Truthout:
BP's oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded in April and, for 36 hours, its flames released immeasurable amounts of toxins into the atmosphere before it sunk into the depths. We now know that the vast majority of the oil that gushed from the well was intentionally submerged by BP via heavy use of dispersants at the wellhead, so most of the oil is floating around in giant undersea plumes, one of which is ten miles long, three miles wide and 300 feet thick. They are like oil bergs - what we see on top of the water is a mere fraction of what lies beneath. This was not an oil leak. This was a volcano of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
...
Jensen, a prolific writer and author of several books, including "A Language Older Than Words" and "Endgame," summarizes the situation we face like this: "The point is that when a gold mining corporation spreads cyanide all over the mine and this hits our groundwater and wells and destroys ground waters in Montana, they are not called a terrorist, they are called a capitalist."
The same can be said for BP. Exxon. Monsanto. Bayer. Dow. Lockheed Martin. It's a long list.

Roy read a story about a tribe of female warriors who interrupted the conﬂict between the Greeks and the Trojans in their quest for males to assist in the propagation of their race. These women called themselves Amazons and were led by Penthesilea, who, as had the rest of the tribe, severed her right breast in order to more swiftly and easily draw back her bow. The most exciting part of the story, Roy thought, was the Amazon queen's confrontation with the champion of the Greeks, Achilles, whose ferocity in battle attracted Penthesilea as no man ever had. For the ﬁrst time she encountered a man she could consider her equal.
The idea of a tribe of brave, vicious, single-breasted women was almost beyond the comprehension of Roy's eleven-year-old mind. He drew pictures of the Amazons as he imagined them, naked, tall, and lean, their long hair tied back with leather thongs.
Roy asked his grandfather if he'd ever read this story.
"Sure," said Pops, "it's in The Iliad, by Homer."
"That's right," Roy said. "I kind of found it by accident on a table at the library. Do you think there really ever was a tribe of savage women like that?"
"I don't think savage is the correct word for them, Roy. They knew what they were doing."
—from "The Age of Fable" at Narrative Magazine